Chapter One: Return to Nareth
The letter arrived on a windless night, borne by a raven whose wings shimmered like wet ink. The scroll it carried was made of Bone paper—once illegal, now nearly forgotten—and tied with a single black feather. Cael read the glyphs by firelight. They burned blue, cold to the eyes.
Cael of Wimbrow, it read, we summon you. The paths are breaking.
He burned the letter after memorizing it and packed his tools: compass of silver and jet, inks made from starlight and sorrow, vellum kissed with salt and ash. He left the cave he had called home and walked east, toward Nareth.
The journey took five days. Along the way, Cael observed the signs: Soul paths like strands of invisible silk unraveling in the air, the wind whispering of lost names, birds flying in disoriented circles. Even the animals could sense something was wrong. In one village, he found a farmer who could no longer recognize his own son. The boy's Soul path had blinked out entirely. Cael left them a Soul binding stone, though he doubted it would help.
The gates of Nareth loomed tall and grey under a slate sky. The city had changed. Once a place of marvel and memory, now its walls were etched with fresh wards and its streets patrolled by watchmen carrying Soul flasks—glass vessels used to trap stray fragments of identity. The air buzzed with disorder, Soul paths crisscrossing above the cobbled roads like frayed netting.
Cael entered unnoticed, his cloak drawn tight. Memories flooded back. The stone plaza where he'd restored a widow's joy. The echo well where he'd listened to a child's laughter lingering three years after their death. The Archive Tower rose in the distance like a needle into the sky.
Archivist Rima waited at the Way stone Archive. She had aged; lines carved deep from worry and late nights. Her eyes lit with a mixture of relief and fear.
"You came," she said.
"The message left no choice."
They embraced briefly—awkwardly. Time had dulled but not erased the camaraderie they once shared.
Rima led him inside. The Archive was as he remembered—endless shelves, suspended bridges of glass and bone, floating codices that spun with silent knowledge. Yet beneath it all was a hum, not of power but of distress.
"I've seen it myself," Rima said. "Paths just... ending. Not fading or branching. Ending. Like someone snapped the thread."
"Show me the first anomaly."
They descended into the Lower Spire, where unsorted Soul maps waited cataloguing. Rima unrolled a scroll with trembling hands. The child's path it depicted began brightly—fluid and confident—but halfway through, the trail cut off. Not a natural fade. A rupture. The path ended mid-gesture, like a sentence without punctuation.
"The child still lives," Rima said. "But their path is... gone."
Cael drew his lens from a pocket. Through it, the Soul map changed: colors deepened, echoes sharpened. What he saw chilled him. The severance point bore a scar. The residue of forceful extraction. Something had not merely cut the Soul path—it had stolen it.
"This was no accident," he said. "Someone did this."
He didn't add what he truly feared: the pattern matched one he'd seen before. Long ago. On the night he disappeared.
They worked late into the night. Cael examined map after map—paths broken mid-step, identities unraveling like frayed rope. All bore the same signature.
"This has to be the same hand," he murmured. "A cartographer, or something worse."
"Worse than you?" Rima asked gently.
Cael flinched. "Worse than I was."
They stood in silence. Guilt weighed heavier than his tools.
At last, Rima led him to the Vault of Echoes—a sealed repository of maps too dangerous or sacred to be studied casually. Few Soul cartographers had ever entered. Even fewer had left unchanged.
The air grew heavy as they descended. Torchlight bent oddly in the corridor, distorting space. The silence was oppressive, like wading through memory.
"We retrieved this yesterday," Rima said, halting before a warded door. She extended a scroll wrapped in black silk. "It reacted to the anomaly."
Cael unwrapped it slowly. The parchment pulsed beneath his fingers. When he unrolled it, symbols leapt to life—not ink, but light, bending and folding in geometric spirals.
It was a Soul map. Not just any.
"This is the work of the First Cartographer," he whispered.
"It was dormant. Until a week ago."
The map showed Nareth—but overlaid with a deeper pattern. Beneath the city's known roads lay another city, one built on memory, Soul paths, and forgotten truths. One path pulsed red, bright and urgent. It wove through streets that didn't exist, into a hollow marked with the rune for origin.
"This map shouldn't exist," Cael said. "The First sealed these designs during the Binding Age."
"And yet here it is," Rima said. "And it matches the anomalies. Someone is trying to remake the Unwritten Path."
Cael stared at the red Soul path. It trembled.
"This line... it's changing."
Rima leaned closer. "What does it mean?"
Cael didn't answer.
Because he knew that path. Had walked its every turn.
It was his.
And someone else was mapping it.
He looked up, the dread sinking deeper. If someone could alter his path—a cartographer's Soul path—they were wielding power thought impossible.
He packed the scroll, wrapped it again in black silk.
"I need to go underground," he said.
"To the origin point?" Rima asked.
"To where my path begins—and where it's being rewritten."
She hesitated. "You should take someone with you."
"No. If they can tamper with Soul paths, they can tamper with memory. I can't trust anyone's mind but my own."
She nodded, reluctantly.
Cael turned once more to the glowing map. The red thread pulsed—faintly at first, then brighter, as if it felt his gaze.
The Soul paths were breaking.
And his might be next.